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Unknown A
Meanwhile, Democrats are trying to figure out what's the angle for 2028. Kamala Harris is still out there lurking somewhere. Believe it or not, people still think that she might be a good candidate, which is hilarious. Pete Buttigieg has decided he's now interested in transportation again. So Pete Buttigieg, the former Secretary of Transportation who couldn't be bothered with his job for two months, or as it turns out, four full years of being Secretary of Transportation, he's now spending every day tweeting about the FAA and such.
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Unknown B
But.
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Unknown A
But there was a big event for various Democrats at which he appeared yesterday. And Pete Buttigieg has always been kind of a weird cat. By this, I mean that Pete Buttigieg has always made sort of moderate sounds, and then the minute he's pushed, he immediately swivels far to the left. I remember when he first launched his campaign in 2020 for president, and I recall actually inviting him on the show, like, suggesting that he come on because he had sort of. Sort of heterodox views on things like how Democrats should talk about identity. He said identitarianism was a bad idea. And then, of course, he immediately swiveled into whatever the Democrats wanted of him. Well, now he's doing sort of the same thing. Here he was yesterday suggesting that maybe Democrats should move away from the identitarianism and the DEI nonsense and stop talking to people this way.
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Unknown A
Here he was at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
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Unknown C
What do we mean when we talk about diversity? Is it caring for people's different experiences and making sure no one's mistreated because of them, which I will always fight for, or is it making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia, which I have also experienced? And it is how it is how Trump Republicans are made, if that comes to your workplace with the best of intentions, but doesn't actually get at what we're. What actually matters here, what's actually at stake?
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Unknown A
Okay, so, you know, that's actually reasonable what he is saying. And then he steps all over himself by suggesting that perhaps Democrats need to infiltrate trad wife spaces online. Oh, boy.
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Unknown C
What I'm really worried about are the people who are not watching CNN or Fox and who are not worried about that, too. A lot of folks aren't looking for political comment, but it's finding them, and it's finding them wrapped up in a lot of cultural stuff. You could be on parenting Instagram, and you're getting this trad wife stuff with a little politics inflected into it or Rogan to the rest of it. And I think we have. We really need to be much smarter about taking this conversation to places where it's not reaching folks.
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Unknown A
Well, I feel like that's not going to work for you guys. You're gonna try and infiltrate trad wife conversations to talk about what? Transgender nonsense. Okay, so if it's not Pete Buttigieg, who is it? Well, maybe it's J.B. pritzker, the rotund governor of Illinois. So he is out there doing a State of the State address and trying to make his case for why he ought to be the Democratic nominee after presumably being lowered by Crane into the Illinois State Capitol. And here he was. His take is. Wait for it. Wait for it. Trump. You're not gonna believe what he's gonna say. Trump is. Wait for it, a Nazi. I did not see that coming.
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Unknown B
The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn't arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame. I'm watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac and suggests without facts or findings that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too female and non white. The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here. They point to a group of people who don't look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems. I just have one question. What comes next? After we've discriminated against, deported, or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities.
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Unknown B
Once we've ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends, after that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face, what comes next? All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don't want to repeat history, then for God's sake, in this moment, we'd better be strong enough to learn from it.
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Unknown A
Just like the Nazis. Just like that. So they're gonna go right back to that. Well, I can't believe the Democrats are having a really tough time dealing with President Trump. I mean, they obviously have such a fertile playbook. Meanwhile, President Trump has now moved forward with endorsing the one big, beautiful bill from the House of Representatives. Senate Republicans had suggested two separate bills. It was House Speaker Mike Johnson who had suggested one big, beautiful bill, which as I say, was all about getting pretty much everything into the bill, because through reconciliation, there's likely only going to be one big bill that got passed this year, not two kind of smaller bills. President Trump put out a lengthy truth social post in which he wrote that both chambers were, quote, doing a spectacular job of working together. But he said, quote, the House resolution implements my full America first agenda.
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Unknown A
Everything, not just parts of it. Trump called on Congress to pass the House version and move all of our priorities to the concept of one big beautiful bill. That is a win for Mike Johnson so far as it goes. It'll be interesting to see if Mike Johnson is able to cobble together support for that one big beautiful bill. Meanwhile, those Trump tax cuts had better be re enshrined because the interest rates are not going down anytime soon, which means availability of money is going to not be quite as easy because the interest rates remain high, which means again, loans are gonna be more expensive and all of that is because inflation remains too high. According to the Wall Street Journal, Fed officials are broadly comfortable with their decision to hold interest rates steady at their meeting last month and offered nothing to suggest any immediate change to their wait and see stance on interest rate cuts.
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Unknown A
The decision last month to leave the benchmark federal funds rate at its current level around 4.3% followed rate cuts at three consecutive meetings beginning in September when the rate was around 5.3%. And the Fed is citing the possibility of inflation due to lack of seasonal labor. So presumably they mean illegal immigrants and also inflation due to the possibility of tariffs. So they're leaving the interest rates precisely where they are. We'll get some more on this in just one moment. First, when it comes to grocery shopping, everybody's got this problem. You get slammed with work, you're not able to find time to actually go to the grocery store. That can all change, thanks to Hungryroot. It's become the easiest way to eat healthy and stay on top of meals. Even with a busy work week. Hungryroot is like having your own personal shopper who really gets you.
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Unknown A
They can handle all your weekly grocery shopping, recommending healthy foods that align with your tastes, nutrition goals and the like. They make it simple to eat high quality, nutritious food. Whether you're looking for anti inflammatory options, gut friendly meals, or you're just trying to get more nutrients in your diet. The best part, hungryroot learns your preferences over time. It's amazing how well they're able to figure out exactly what you like and everything they offer is free from high fructose corn syrup and artificial preservatives. Hungryroot, for example, makes it really easy for me to order my kosher dairy products. I'm loving the yogurt they've been sending. I use it for the smoothies. Take advantage of this exclusive offer for a limited time, get 40% off your first box, plus get a free item in every box for life. Click the link below or go to hungryroot.com, use code SHAPIRO.
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Unknown A
That's 40% off your first box and a free item of your choice for life. @hungryroot.com, code Shapiro. Again, that's hungryroot.com, code Shapiro to get started. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is looking into overspending at the Department of Defense, and it is unclear to me what exactly the policy is. So if the policy here is to unleash doge on the Department of Defense to find golden toilet seats, I'm all for it. If we're talking about getting rid of the sort of waste, fraud and abuse that we've seen in pretty much every other department, I'm in favor of it. It's not clear that's what the policy is, apparently. According to the Washington Post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has now ordered senior leaders at the Pentagon and throughout the US military to develop plans for cutting 8% from the defense budget in each of the next five years, according to a memo obtained by the Washington Post and officials familiar with the matter.
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Unknown A
That is a massive, massive reduction in military expenditure among the areas that the Trump administration wants exempted operations at the U.S. southern border, modernization of nuclear weapons and missile defense, and acquisition of some raids one way attack drones and other munitions, robert Solisa, a senior Pentagon official, said in a statement. The money saved could be realigned to pay for new priorities in the Trump administration, including for example, Iron Dome for America. So if we're talking about is to save money in other in some areas to move toward new weapons systems, all in favor of it. That sounds great to me because obviously the money that's been allocated to many of the older weapons system is money that is wasted. If the goal, however, is actual spending cuts that are not reallocated into growth of our military power around the globe, that to me is a large scale mistake.
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Unknown A
The Pentagon budget for 2025 is about $850 billion, with broad consensus on Capitol Hill that extensive spending is necessary to deter both China and Russia. If adopted in full, the cuts would include tens of billions of dollars in each of of the Next five years. Now, again, if the goal here is to simply cut that waste, fraud and abuse, that's one thing. If the cuts are being identified by size and not by location, that is another thing. Well, you see that what I'm. The argument that I'm making here is if you find like a bad weapons program, you should cut it no matter how much it costs. If the goal Is to cut 8% and you're just spotting places to cut to hit that 8%, that is a bigger problem because you could be cutting into actual muscle at that point. You're no longer cutting fat at that point, you're cutting into actual muscle.
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Unknown A
And this is a problem because the reality is that the United States is actually not spending like a country that is preparing to retain its position of world dominance. We are not. Here, for example, is a chart of US Military spending by percentage of gdp. Historically, this particular chart, you can see that during wartime it spiked. It was all the way up at near 15% in 1953. And then it's been steadily declining since the end of the Cold War. By the end of the Cold War, the United States was spending north of 6% of GDP. Today, we are spending approximately 3.6% of our GDP on defense. And that's in the face of a very aggressive China. China is a rising power. China is extraordinarily aggressive. Cutting our own defense capacity in the face of all this would be a big, fairly large scale mistake. The commander of Indo Pacific guy named Admiral Sam Paparo, he said, quote, work very close to the point where on a daily basis the fig leaf of an exercise could very well hide operational warning, meaning China doing these sort of military exercises around Taiwan, their aggressive maneuvers around Taiwan
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Unknown A
right now are not exercises. They call them, they're rehearsals. They're rehearsals for the forced unification of Taiwan to the mainland. Paparo said our magazines run low. Our maintenance backlogs grow longer each month. We operate on an increasingly thin margin of error. Our opponents see these gaps and they're moving aggressively to exploit them. And that is right. And when it comes to, for example, Chinese military spending, the reality is that China, well, the claim is that China's only spending like 1 point something percent, 1.6% of their GDP on defense. That's not actually true. Other estimates suggest they're not spending $280 billion on their military every year. They're spending close to $700 billion on the military every year and hiding it in order to prevent the United States from seeing exactly what it is that they are doing. And this raises some generalized questions about what exactly the Trump foreign policy is going to look like and we have some indicators.
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Unknown A
Obviously it's an aggressive foreign policy willing to use economic power in order to leverage change in places like Colombia or in Mexico. President Trump is willing to think outside the box in the Middle east in I think new and amazing ways and President Trump obviously wants to get to a solution in Ukraine. If however the goal is to cut defense, if the goal is a sort of generalized American retreat from the world, the sort of neo isolationist position that if the United States retreats from the world that nothing fills the gap that is just not true, something will fill the gap and the thing that fills the gap will not be friendly to the United States. Are you tired of the lies and the twist of the mainstream media talking points? Yeah, me too. Join me in my newest series Fact where I dismantle and bring truth to this tiring mainstream agenda.